Hussein's Eco-terrorism Contributes To Science

The Gulf War - one year later

Scientists Are Seizing Upon A Unique Opportunity To Learn From The Environmental Disasters Caused By The Persian Gulf War.

January 16, 1992|By Jeff Nesmith Cox News Service

WASHINGTON — For all his bluster and hyperbole, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein may have successfully elevated himself beyond the level of two-bit dictator in one aspect of the Persian Gulf War.

The eco-terrorism that Hussein's troops carried out when they opened Kuwait oil lines into the sea and set fire to hundreds of oil wells created an unparalleled environmental disaster.

Scientists say it will be years before the fragile desert sands of the Arabian peninsula can recover from hundreds of thousands of tons of soot that settled out of the oil well smoke.

The unusually shallow waters of the Persian Gulf may be permanently damaged by the largest oil spill in history.

In addition, untold thousands of people living in Kuwait and other Gulf states may become casualties of the short war decades from now as a result of breathing carcinogen-laden air during the 10 months that the oil wells burned.

Yet in an ironic way, the environmental disaster represents a unique scientific opportunity.

''It was a terrible experiment, not one that any scientist would deliberately put in motion,'' said Dr. Sylvia Earle, chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, ''but since it is there, there is an opportunity for us to learn from it.''

Earle will lead a delegation of more than 120 scientists from 10 countries, including Iran, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, to the gulf on a scientific expedition aboard NOAA's research vessel Mt. Mitchell in May.

In only six days, oil mains deliberately opened by Iraqi troops dumped from 6 million to 8 million barrels of crude oil into the gulf.

Scientists have only a vague understanding of what happens to that much oil in the sea. It floats to shore, picks up sand and is washed back out to sea, where the sand causes it to sink. From the sea floor, some of it floats back to the surface, collects in ''tar balls'' and floats back to shore.

Not so clear, however, is the effect it will have on coral reefs and mangroves that grow on the shore.

Scientists at the University of Miami's Reef Research Group are interested in studying these effects, in part because temperature and other conditions in the Persian Gulf are similar to Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico waters around Florida.

''There are certain fisheries parallels as well,'' Earle said. ''There are about a dozen species of commercially important shrimp, for example, in the Persian Gulf that have a parallel in the United States with our interests in fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico. What are the effects of a massive oil spill on commercially important species?''

The huge oil spill was dwarfed by the oil well fires.

Visible from space, the enormous plumes of black smoke appear to have never reached sufficient altitudes to be caught by stratospheric circulation patterns that could have carried them over the globe and caused worldwide climate changes, as some scientists initially feared they would.

But the fires generated an estimated 500,000 tons of air pollution a day, ranging from unburned oil that fell from the sky like rain to exotic carcinogenic chemicals.

Now, with the last fire extinguished Nov. 5, scientists from NOAA, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the World Health Organization, the United Nations and the Intergovernment Oceanographic Commission are trying to monitor the long-term effects of the smoke.